Ralph Ellison

FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT RALPH ELLISON - PAGE 2

When Ralph Ellison received the 1953 National Book Award for Fiction for his first novel, "Invisible Man," he said, "If I were asked ... what I considered to be the chief significance of `Invisible Man' I would reply ... its attempt to return to the mood of personal moral responsibility for democracy which typified the best of our 19th Century fiction." "Personal moral responsibility," as well as a passionate eloquence, informed Ellison's book then, and it still does now, as I discovered anew last week when I took out my yellowed paperback of this landmark American novel and started to reread its story of one black man's tormented odyssey in the United States.

Invisible Man By Ralph Ellison Published in 1947 "I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids--and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me." ---------- Are there any first lines of books that have provoked, touched or inspired you? We invite you to send them in for consideration.

Jerre Mangione, a writer whose thinly veiled memoir of life in a Sicilian enclave in Rochester, N.Y., became a classic of American ethnic literature and gave a new name to his boyhood haunts, has died. He was 89. Mr. Mangione died Aug. 16 in his Haverford home. His first book, "Mount Allegro," was written as a nonfiction account of his life as the son of Sicilian immigrants who spent their lives struggling to offset the view that all Sicilians were criminals. But a month before publication in 1943, Mr. Mangione said in an interview in 1981 that Houghton Mifflin "insisted on publishing it as fiction because their sales department decided it would sell better with that label."

If Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" comes to any conclusions down there in his basement after a lifetime of confusion, disappointment and hurt, after a good long spin on the racially painted American carousel of the mid-20th century, he finally spits them out at the end. "America," says this Mr. Cellophane, this strangely heroic anti-hero, "is made up of many strands. I would recognize it and let it so remain. " Like so much in this singular, 600-page, 1952 novel - and now, at the Court Theatre in Chicago, a remarkable, 205-minute, must-see, three-act dramatic achievement adapted by the writer and filmmaker Oren Jacoby - that remark offers very good advice for anyone, say, staring with disbelief at the men who make up a presidential primary, or merely trying to deal with a neighbor of a diffrerent stripe.

Having read many pieces on the George Zimmerman case, I found Don Wycliff's commentary piece (" The fatal consequences of Zimmerman's 'blindness ," July 16) to be compelling. Wycliff does a masterful job of explaining the particular racism in operation, and he relates it to the unique arrogance demonstrated by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in the Voting RIghts Act decision. Then, in referencing Ralph Ellison's “Invisible Man,” he has crystallized the issue in a way that so many others seem unable to do. Of course race is at the heart of the matter here. Were it a white teenager returning to the complex with his candy and tea, it is unlikely that Zimmerman would have noticed or cared. This is a man who had made dozens of calls to the police in recent years, reporting the "suspicious" behavior of black youth in the area. That he was portrayed as the one acting in self-defense - when in fact he set the series of events in motion by stalking an innocent person - seems absurd to many of us. But somehow the unarmed teenaged victim has been deemed the real threat in the scenario, whereas the alleged adult in the incident, and clearly the aggressor, is freed. And, of course, Zimmerman must be allowed to reclaim his gun. - Joseph Bauers, Champaign, Ill.

Capitol Hill in Black and White, by Robert Parker, with Richard Rashke (Jove, $4.50). In the mid-1940s, Lyndon Johnson got Parker a job as a postal worker and in return used Parker as a chauffeur and bodyguard. From there Parker became headwaiter and maitre d` of the Senate dining room and its many branches-the Senators` hideaways, where they held private meetings to broker power and where they rendezvoused with their mistresses. Parker learned how the Capitol game is played from many mentors, some deliberate, some inadvertent.

By Reviewed by Charles Nicol, Professor of English at Indiana State University and author of many articles on Mark Twain | June 20, 1993

Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices By Shelley Fisher Fishkin Oxford, 256 pages, $23 `Huckleberry Finn" has often been called the greatest novel ever written by an American, but somebody always wants to take an ax to the tallest tree. Taught in the public schools as a children's book, studied in universities as literature and read by ordinary grown-ups for sheer pleasure, "Huckleberry Finn" also has been banished from some libraries and school reading lists.

LOVE INVENTS US By Amy Bloom (Vintage $12) A bittersweet novel revolving around three people and the ways the joys and sorrows of love shape their lives. FLYING HOME By Ralph Ellison (Vintage $12) In this collection of 13 stories, Ellison takes readers from the Jim Crow South to a Harlem bingo parlor to the hobo haunts of the Great Depression. THE FLIGHT OF THE IGUANA By David Quammen (Touchstone $13) Fascinating and witty essays on the overlooked aspects of science and nature.

Nathan A. Scott Jr. was a scholar of religion who reflected on great works of literature during a long academic career that included 21 years as a professor at the University of Chicago. Dr. Scott, 81, died on Wednesday, Dec. 20, in Charlottesville, Va., of lung cancer, said his wife, Charlotte. Dr. Scott had been a professor at the University of Virginia for 14 years before his retirement in 1990. Dr. Scott was a professor in the University of Chicago Divinity School from 1955 to 1976.

By Reviewed by Andy Solomon, Fiction editor of the Tampa Review and professor of English at the University of Tampa | August 7, 1994

Relocations of the Spirit By Leon Forrest Asphodel Press/Moyer Bell, 398 pages, $24.95 America's myth structure is like no other. Having severed roots in exchange for hope, those who left old worlds for this new one mortgaged their past to buy a future. New Americans abandoned the old gods of tradition and stability in favor of Proteus, the personification of change that fits any new condition. And no newcomers brought less hope or developed a greater capacity for reinventing themselves than those dragged from Africa, who faced the enforced redefinition of their human spirit by those who had forged their chains.